LAHORE: The investigations into the rape-cum-murder case of eight-year-old girl that surfaced in Kasur indicated that a serial killer was behind all the eight cases reported in the district since 2015.

The Kasur district police had been looking for the culprit with no significant development so far.

The first case was reported in 2015 in which the suspect was spotted by a local when he was going to assault a minor girl in an under-construction house, a senior police officer told Dawn on Wednesday.

However, he said, the suspect manged to flee the scene, while the man who rescued the girl was later engaged by the police to trace the suspect. With his help, the police had prepared a rudimentary sketch of the suspect making it part of the record, he added.

The police official said that later more incidents of abduction of children, including five girls, occurred in Kasur district.

All the cases were reported in the jurisdiction of three police stations – A Division, B Division and Sadar.

Three out of the eight cases, including the latest one, occurred recently.

He said a team of senior police officers had last year made an effort to conduct a detailed analysis of all the cases in the light of circumstantial evidences, DNA test reports, statements of the two girls who survived the assaults, the witnesses and other relevant information.

The efforts were prompted in July 2017 by surfacing of another case of a child’s murder after sexual abuse.

The officers had reached the conclusion that a single person was behind all the cases surfacing in the district.

The view got further strengthened when the investigators found close resemblance between the man in the CCTV footage of Zainab and the culprit’s sketch in the police record.

“We had started hunt for the serial killer shortly after the first case in 2015”, the police official said.

“We had got reports of five DNA samples sent to the lab for analysis and the reports showed they belonged to the same person”, the police official said.